Culture and Coexistence into the Great Unknown
Marcus Lopez Senior, member of the Barbareno Chumash Nation in California, speaks with Jack Eidt from SoCal 350 on climate chaos and the impacts on the Chumash people from fires, mudslides, colonization, land theft, gentrification, and offshore drilling.
Jack Eidt writes on the California wildfires and their dangerous connection with climate change, melting of Arctic sea ice, and the drying out of the US West Coast. We must reduce our dependency on fossil fuels, get cracking on a just transition to an economy based on clean, efficient, renewable energy, and start making our homes and lives more extreme-climate-resilient.
Since the solar eclipse of 2017, climate and tectonic instability has accelerated across the Earth: Rehearsal for the End Times? Predicted fossil fueled climate disruption and superstorm cataclysm? Sun-Moon alignment that bulged the Earth’s crust, precipitating earthquakes? What really is happening here? We survey scientific, religious, and traditional indigenous belief for answers.
The US Forest Service salvage logging plan ended up damaging the health of the Greater Yosemite Ecosystem far more than 2013’s massive Rim Fire. Chad Hanson from the John Muir Project of the Earth Island Institute explains how wildfires can promote ecological health and survival of many plant and wildlife communities, despite the intense heat and scale of the blazes.
Though the Rim Fire of 2013 was the third largest conflagration in California’s history, it improved the ecological health of the forest and the majority of the iconic landscapes of Yosemite National Park remained unscathed. A salvage logging plan approved by the US Forest Service put in danger the regenerating effects of the fire.
“Severe grazing is absolutely essential to maintain biodiversity,” argues Allan Savory in a recent TED Talk. Of course, this is the opposite of scientific truth for the sensitive desert ecosystem. Advocating “holistic grazing,” Mr. Savory pieces together false assumptions to produce ineffective but popular recommendations on climate change.
It’s like a Gary Larson cartoon. Fires, floods, and droughts keep coming and we laugh them off, though the joke might be on us. We must all make positive personal and political contributions to solving the climate crisis before it’s too late.